On the whole the evidence shows that the neolithic inhabitants of Britain, or at all events a large proportion of them, were descended from ancestors who lived in the Mediterranean basin. But it does not follow that they were more intimately related to the people whom the ancient writers called Iberians than to some other branch of the Mediterranean stock. It is certain that before the Romans entered the Spanish peninsula two languages at least besides Celtic were spoken there,--Basque and the language of the so-called Iberian inscriptions.[1757] The latter has not yet been deciphered: but, as we have seen,[1758] all attempts to explain it by means of Basque have failed; and, as Professor Morris Jones admits, all attempts to discover traces of Basque influence in the Celtic dialects have been equally unsuccessful.[1759]
Therefore it should be distinctly understood that if the term ‘Iberian’ is to be applied to the neolithic inhabitants of Britain, it must be taken in a purely conventional sense.[1760]
M. d’Arbois de Jubainville[1761] adduces various British place-names, for example, _Sabrina_ (the Severn), Isca (the Exe), _Albion_, and _Cantium_ (Kent), which he chooses to call Ligurian; but I am not aware that he has made any converts. Little or nothing is known about the Ligurian tongue;[1762] and even if M. d’Arbois’s conjectures could be verified their ethnological value would be comparatively slight; for, as I have shown elsewhere,[1763] there is some reason to believe that the Ligurians, like the Iberians, belonged to the ‘Mediterranean’ stock.
It is perhaps hardly necessary now to insist upon the fact that the Long Barrow race is not extinct. Not only have their remains been found, as we shall presently see, in graves of the Bronze Age and the Late Celtic period,[1764] but men of the same type, but little modified, are still numerous.[1765]
It is often taken for granted that no round barrows were erected in Britain before the close of the Neolithic Age, and that the earliest of the brachycephalic invaders whose remains have been found in them landed with bronze weapons in their hands.[1766] But these assumptions are made in spite of conclusive evidence. There is not the slightest doubt that most if not all of the circular chambered cairns of Argyllshire, Caithness, Orkney, and Derbyshire were erected before the Bronze Age in those parts began.[1767] Dr. Garson, speaking of brachycephalic skulls which have been found in round barrows in Orkney, says that ‘the fact that no metals of any kind were found, and that all the implements were of the most primitive manufacture, points to the people belonging to the unpolished stone period’, and concludes that ‘we probably post-date the existence of the people who buried in the round barrows of Orkney if we attribute them with (_sic_) the same antiquity as those of the round barrows of England’.[1768] Dr. Garson has also shown that the round barrow of Howe Hill in Yorkshire was erected in the Neolithic Age, and that the skeletons found in it belong to the Long Barrow type.[1769] The round-headed people who introduced drinking-cups into our island brought no bronze with them. According to Barnard Davis, a skull from a chambered round barrow at Parsley Hay Low in Derbyshire, which had a cephalic index of 81, ‘without doubt belongs to the early “stone-period”’;[1770] and he assigns to the same epoch another skull, the cephalic index of which was the same, from Green Gate Hill barrow, Pickering, Yorkshire.[1771] Canon Greenwell suggests that some of the round barrows ‘belong to an age before bronze was discovered’; and it is certain that the round barrows of this country were connected by evolution with the earlier long barrows.[1772] Finally, if Sergi[1773] is right in maintaining that ‘the new burial custom of cremation’ was introduced into Europe by brachycephalic immigrants, it follows that they invaded Britain in the Neolithic Age; for in this country, as in Gaul, cremation was then practised.[1774]
